I'm not sure when this took place, but there has been a stealth buff to Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor. The Lightning Bolt now appears to do 300% of it's tooltip damage, and now appears to fire at a maximum of 5 charges, down from 10.

I'm seeing it do from 4-6% of my damage on a boss fight. I think it's time to reconsider the BiS lists.

In 391 BiS with Dragonwrath, 398 VPLC is much better than Shard for Arcane.
In 391 BiS Frost with Dragonwrath, the two best trinkets are VPLC and Necromantic Focus
in 391 BiS Fire with Dragonwrath has always been the VPLC and Rune.

In 391 BiS with Dragonwrath, 398 VPLC is much better than Shard for Arcane.
In 391 BiS Frost with Dragonwrath, the two best trinkets are VPLC and Necromantic Focus
in 391 BiS Fire with Dragonwrath has always been the VPLC and Rune.

I don't have the patience to go back and look through all the pages for this thread to see if this was mentioned already, but I'm getting Glyph of Molten Armor > Glyph of Frostbolt by as little as 30 dps in my current gear.

As it stands now, yes it's better to wait until you have 4-pieces T12 before switching.

I've finally been catching up on this thread after a few months just kind of doing my own frost magey goodness, and I saw several posts asking about going from T11 4pc to T11 2pc and T12 2pc. The answer given was usually something like the one above. I'm just curious under what circumstances hanging on to 4pc T11 was considered better?

For all sims that I did both at the time of switching from my 4pc T11 to 2pc T11/2pc T12 and reran today using current gear and going back to 4pc T11 from 2pc T11/2pc T12, the 2pc T11/2pc T12 combo always nets higher dps, usually on the order of about 1,000 DPS. I'm not sure if I'm perhaps using an older version of SimCraft, have made drastically different gear choices than the norm, or if there are assumptions being made about which pieces you might replace / the possibility of heroic T11. However, if you were unlucky enough to have no heroic T11 as I was, and say replace the gloves and legs of your T11 with T12 (this nets the least amount of reforging for pure stat and 2 pc bonus gain), then the flat stat gain and 2-3% damage increase from the T12 2pc bonus should outweigh the 10% haste on FB.

Also, blargh at MMO not letting me separate these into two posts without trying to edit one into the other >_<:

I was also wondering: After obtaining Necromantic Focus last night over a rather dejected shadow priest and starting to test it out a bit on dummies, I started to wonder if anyone had any thoughts on whether or not it's worth occasionally hard casting a FFB to keep the mastery proc from NF going if it appears that you're going to lose it, especially if you do not have the 4pc T12 bonus yet (my frost mage is my alt and while I love him, it's going to be difficult to get the 4pc because of getting to Domo).

Because of FFB's long cast time and the time it takes for the DoT itself to actually tick, this requires you to hard cast FFB with approximately 5-6 seconds left on the buff timer without any DoTs remaining. Anything under 5 seconds and you can get the FFB itself off, but the DoT won't tick fast enough to refresh the proc stacks. Obviously this is not ideal and you have a large amount of uptime without doing this anyway, and even more uptime if you have the 4pc T12. Just trying to ponder if the slight DPS loss from the occasional FFB instead of FB cast can be offset by constantly keeping up the mastery proc. Thoughts?

I have. What I haven't figured out is what the point recasting flamestrike is a loss over just continuing to spam blizzard after it wears off. It's a nice boost to an otherwise crap AOE, but we really do need FoF blizzards back.

Ok, I am trying to improve my frost mage and add flamestrike to my AoE. Before I simply had Blizzard bound to a key. Now instead I bound a macro to this key:

So when I go into a AoE fight I start with shift+key and then continue simply with the key. Now, for some reason this is not working. It shows the Blizzard tooltip and if I press the key it casts Blizzard, and if I press shift it will show the Flamestrike tooltip but when I press shift+key it won't cast anything. What am I missing? I have an identical macro for switching between armors and it works flawlessly.

EDIT: if I press shift and click on the icon, it works and casts Flamestrike, what gives?

I tried your build and I liked it though one thing I found was the ignite talent doesn't seem to contribute as much as I thought it would

tried a few runs and ignite is my lowest contributing damage of my spells at like 2%

would putting the 3 points in "fire power" instead make up a better investment.

3.8% of my total damage on Baleroc, and I don't have my 4p yet, versus +3% damage to 9.9 and 5.2% of my damage. Adds 27317.4 damage, slightly higher than DMC:V's damage proc, which is 0.3% of my damage. Even if you account for the explosion that hits like a wet noodle, which is next to nothing, as well as fire damage which doesn't have our frost spec apply to it. Let's pretend I've got the highest fire mage on Baleroc 10's explosion damage, so add 44k. 71317 vs 231143.

3.8% of my total damage on Baleroc, and I don't have my 4p yet, versus +3% damage to 9.9 and 5.2% of my damage. Adds 27317.4 damage, slightly higher than DMC:V's damage proc, which is 0.3% of my damage. Even if you account for the explosion that hits like a wet noodle, which is next to nothing, as well as fire damage which doesn't have our frost spec apply to it. Let's pretend I've got the highest fire mage on Baleroc 10's explosion damage, so add 44k. 71317 vs 231143.

Ignite wins.

Wasn't the discussion we had some time ago centered around whether Firepower was better than Netherwind Presence, with a huge factor being SimCraft not allowing Frost to gain the explosion with only 2 points in FP? How did we get into discussing FP vs. Ignite?

The guy I quoted was talking Ignite vs FP, saying 2% of his overall damage was lower than expected and wanted to use FP instead.

Edit: Hm, on the FP vs NP, could we not run the sim for 3/3 FP, grab the damage/DPS contribution, run the sim again at 2/3 to allow for the 2% fire damage, take 1% off the explosion damage and multiply it by .66 to figure out a rough estimate? It'd at least give us a ballpark number.

The guy I quoted was talking Ignite vs FP, saying 2% of his overall damage was lower than expected and wanted to use FP instead.

Edit: Hm, on the FP vs NP, could we not run the sim for 3/3 FP, grab the damage/DPS contribution, run the sim again at 2/3 to allow for the 2% fire damage, take 1% off the explosion damage and multiply it by .66 to figure out a rough estimate? It'd at least give us a ballpark number.

Ugh, I'd have to remove 1% from FFB and FO, then reduce the explosion rate to...bah fine, brb.